Audience is King – Content Has Been Deposed!

Audience is King!

Content has been cast out and exiled to the realm of no return!

Well, not quite. But a recent article by wetpaint CEO Ben Elowitz highlights the very real, often overlooked fact of Internet marketing – content is not the goal of advertising, audience is. To say audience is king is to prioritize the distribution of content.

In many ways, this resembles the term that I’ve always preferred to content marketing: context marketing. We all know that content is critical, but without understanding the proper context, how can we know what content and which distribution methods are the most relevant and effective in reaching our target audience? With so many options out there today – so many avenues and channels to market in – it is more important than ever before for us consider, prioritize, and choose which verticals we allocate our resources to.

Excerpted from the article:

Content is king” has been a long-lived mantra of media. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was true.

But over the last several years, the Internet has upheaved the aphorism.

It used to be that media was linear. And in that world, content and distribution were married. The HBO channel had HBO content. A New York Times subscription bought you New York Times content. And Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month delivered exclusive and proprietary content from … Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Until the Internet came along. In every single one of the varied businesses the Internet has touched — from commerce to media to communications to payments — there has been one common impact: disaggregation.